Birth place of Dwight D Eisenhower

Monday evening. I've been having problems with very slow and unreliable internet connections. And expensive internet connections too. I will add photos when I get home or we stop somewhere that has a truly high speed internet connection.
We are in Abilene Kansas, birthplace of Dwight D Eisenhower and location of his Presidential Library. Never having seen a presidential library, we will check it out in the morning.

After Wilgus State Park we made it to the Foxwoods Casino in eastern Connecticut. Had a good time, and actually won a few bucks playing poker with a bunch of guys with from Boston and Providence. Took a while to tune my ear to the eastern seaboard accents. Very interesting listening to the way they talked. We thought about staying over another day because Atlantic City was shut down. And that was exactly why they didn't have any rooms available for Thursday. It was just as well. We played a little more in the morning and headed for Cleveland. We drove across Connecticut, New York and half way across Pennsylvania before we stopped for the evening in Bloomsberg PA. Got a room in a nice little motel called The Inn at Turkey Hill.

Friday we drove to the outskirts of Cleveland and hit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame first thing Saturday morning. Some really cool stuff there. Its right on the water front. The building was designed by I M Pai. Very futuristic, glass and chrome, lot of angles with has six floors. The basement has the bulk of the collection and the floors get smaller as you go up. The top two floors are for whatever special exhibition is going on. We caught one of the last days of the Bob Dylan exhibit. Lots of memorabilia from his early life and early career. They had a bunch of sound booths to listen to his music while reading about it's significance in its time and even today. We spent about four hours there and could have just as easily spent another four hours.

We proceeded to Speedway Indiana, just outside Indianapolis. Sunday morning we visited the raceway museum and took a lap around the raceway itself in a tour van. They have a number of cars that participated in the races over the years. The raceway will be 100 in 2009. Look for a big celebration that year. The collection includes the STP turbine powered car that lead the race the whole way until a gearbox failure knocked it out of the race with 4 laps to go. I vividly remember listening to that race when I was a kid in Milwaukee. They also have some Nascar and Formula 1 cars represented in the collection. The Formula 1 cars can go 0 to 60 in 3 seconds! I have been following Formula 1 racing for a couple of years now. It was great to be able to see a couple of cars up close. We missed the US Grand Prix by a week. (Michael Schumacher won in a Ferrari, if you were wondering...)

After the racing museum we proceeded to St Louis and arrived in time to check out the Gateway Arch. They have a tram (little cars, kind of like pods, that hold 5 people each) that goes up to the top of the Arch. There is a viewing area with windows that overlook the city on one side and the Mississippi and East St Louis (Illinois) on the other side. We headed out of town to find more reasonable accommodations for the evening and discovered that there is a Harrahs Casino and Hotel in the outskirts of St Louis. We managed to get a room there. It was pretty crowded. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised at that, this is prime vacation time afterall.... So we had a nice meal and tried some games of chance. P seemed to do ok but the people I played cards with must have seen me coming. It wasn't a good evening for me. We were going to check out the Budweiser Clysdales but you have to make a reservation first. It isn't something you can just drop in and see. So, we turned the car west and here we are in Kansas. We had a nice storm pass by in the last hour. Only a little bit of thunder and lightening. We have been very lucky so far, weather wise, this vacation, in all the places we've been. I think this is the third time the rain has caught us in the 17 days we've been on the road. Lets hope it stays that way.

Tomorrow we hope to be in Denver or beyond. We've been away from home for a long time. Getting to sleep in our own bed is sounding better and better to us.